Eliza Swann

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo: There are so many paths through which this conversation can proceed. I feel that I am at a major crossroads at the moment of talking with you, Eliza. The image I receive mentally is that of an asterisk — I am in the middle of it *. Can you pull one of your tarot cards and guide us on this journey?

Eliza Swann: The Hanged One! The vegetal deity that has their head in the underworld and their limbs and reproductive organs up in the air, as plants do. The important thing to note here is that the Hanged One's heart is over their head – so we'll proceed that way, heart over head.

NDERE: Tell me about the Golden Dome School. I see some commonalities between this and the Interior Beauty Salon. It is as if we were deep listening to an urgent whisper from the Universe calling us for a shift of paradigms in the creative field.

ES: The Golden Dome School started to foment in 2013. I finished an MFA in 2012 at an institution where I was constantly belittled and discouraged from being mystical, emotional, intuitive, and interdisciplinary — not just by the school, but by curators, grant givers and art gatekeepers of all kinds. No one seemed to want to address magic or emotions or capitalism or climate change in our work together as cultural engineers. I had also been a member of some mystery schools that had similar toxic hierarchies to the art institution and I felt that I was outside of art circles and magic circles alike. This created profound depression and confusion for me as I drifted around Europe after grad school. I went to the site of the Oracles at Delphi in Greece and begged the ground there for an answer. I was told “Go back to New York – be a psychic and an artist. They're both the same – art and divination are the same!” So I went back to New York where I'm from and started teaching Tarot classes and began offering psychic readings publicly as an art practice.

Shortly thereafter, I was visited by a spirit who told me to found a school for artists who were interested in art and its relationship to mystical practice, and to call it the Golden Dome School. So I did! With no real estate, capital, or institutional support I went for it. The first year or two of running the school was fraught with problems, but I kept going. I was determined to create a space for a non-competitive mystical arts community to gather, to see what new art forms we could make between us. The Golden Dome started out as an artist residency, and has evolved into a year-round program of exhibitions, classes, and artist residencies. The Golden Dome is founded on principles of undoing systems of hierarchy, exclusion, punishment, and individualism. By upholding ideals of interdependence, responsiveness, nurturance and reciprocity in our work we hope to unearth art forms and ways of being that are liberatory and evolutionary.

NDERE: Which would you say is the tarot card that comes up when we think of where we are now as a collective, either going through a rebirth with the Earth or walking towards our own extinction? Can you say something about that card?

ES: One card that many of us are sitting with now is “The Tower.” The enlightening bolt tears down the tower by giving us a truth that unmakes our blind spots. What we have not wanted to see (in ourselves, our relationships, our values, in how our communities are organized, in our systems) is revealed in a flash of light. What we choose to do with the unmaking of our illusions is potentially remarkable and revolutionary. Not just for ourselves, but for our world. I am heartened and amazed to hear larger conversations happening that are anti-capitalist, anti-police, anti-fascist, climate-change aware, race-conscious, pro-mutual-aid. What will we do now that our illusions of safety are dissolving? Will we help one another? It's potentially so amazing, so staggeringly beautiful. I choose to lean into the sense of possibility that exists after the lightning strikes.

NDERE: Can you talk about magic in relationship to race, gender, sexuality and the Earth?

ES: That's such a big, important question! And it's a question that I'm actively working on — not just by myself, but in community. There are many layers to your question that relate to history, colonization, and the manufacture of hierarchy that I think is bigger than what I can address alone in this format. I'd like to put it on a banquet table and chew on it with dozens of magicians.

What I can say in this moment is — there are many definitions of magic that over-emphasize the cultivation of the personal will, especially those coming out of Victorian occult societies (which were largely very racist and patriarchal). The cultivation of personal will is important in the process of learning to live authentically — capitalist society tries to monoculture our birth, labor, death, and soul for extraction — personal will is paramount in remaining true. But magic is much more than personal will - the cult of individualism has us concentrating resources into the hands of a few to the detriment of all. There is far too much magical theory that concentrates on individual acquisition and success aggression.

From where I stand, there is no one self, but a complex array of selves that overlap in infinite kaleidoscopic arrangements with all other things. I personally focus on magic that creates limitless possibility and takes our connectedness into account. 

NDERE: Healing has become such a catchword in the Arts. Sometimes it seems that this is taken lightly, and naïvely unaware of the commitment that this path entails. On the other hand, it is auspicious to see the Arts opening up to it. As a creative, like you, invested in years of trainings and explorations in healing, what do you have to say about this trend?

ES: I have not viewed the art institutional opening to healing and magic as a trend so much as a return to sanity! It is really only since that dreadful period in European art called The Renaissance (when European elites were running around sabotaging, colonizing and Christianizing art and cosmology around the world) that we were forced to swallow these strange notions that art is somehow born of white male human intellectual supremacy and the monotheistic god that created it.

Art at its center is magic — art changes, defines, shapes and nourishes the spirit of the collective imagination which is the engine of our communal will. Imagination combined with will changes everything. Art raises, models and informs the genius of the beholder and is inherently healing, regardless of what training or degrees an artist earns. I hope that resources will continue to increasingly go toward those whose art, magic and healing disciplines are visionary, communal, life affirming and edge-walking.

NDERE: What would you say about the role of the artist in the midst of the collapse that we are living today? How do you envision it?

ES: My own personal cosmology these days doesn't have “artists” defined as a small group of people who make art objects. For me, artists are those who are willing to surrender to their genius and grab the lightning. Art is how we do everything — it's in how we organize, the ways that we gesture, our choice of words — regardless of what mediums we use or what education we receive. In pre-Christian Roman mysticism, the genius is the divine inspiration that is present in every person, place, or thing — the genius is the attending spirit that  gives everyone the flavor of their unique self-expression. Genius is not limited to people “successfully” practicing one of the traditional forms of art, or even in an outcome. I feel the genius of planet Earth foaming with music and information — I hope that we'll all be brave enough to take responsibility and listen, surrender, hold the lightning, and do what must be done in accordance with our divine talents. Art is evolutionary revolutionary power that's available to everyone. For myself, I have answered a call to do “re-enchantment” actions — where I gather with people in graveyards, the desert, museums, wherever — and we get ourselves soft enough to hear the sentience and the voice in everything. The sun, a toothbrush, grass, rabbits, paintings, the dead — they all speak in the enchanted world.

NDERE: I am curious about objects and fetishes in the Arts. While I understand their role in rituals and ceremonies, I often see myself going to an exhibition and being surrounded by the corpses of the creative process.  On other occasions I find myself in the presence of objects imbued with energy — alive.  What are your thoughts about this?

ES: What a beautiful observation! I started giving Psychic Tours of museums and art exhibitions in 2015 so that I could connect groups of people with feeling the energy of art. I give art lovers exercises to help them connect with art intuitively, emotionally, and communally so that we can read it — our psychic centers become a needle that we can run over the grooves of art to hear its music. Some art really feels like a pile of intellectually arranged materials, while other works are inspirited and alive, as you say. This often has to do with the process of creation where there is a transmission of energy into material. There are different ways to imbue objects with energy or spirit – some methods are ritual, some methods are related to intensity of emotion, some methods relate to repetition. I'm writing a book called “The Dead Aren't Dead and Art Isn't Either” about the psychic tours and my views on the relationship between ritual, art, and spirit that tackles these ideas. 

NDERE: Can you send us off with some of your wisdom?

ES: Oh! I'd love to just thank you for creating this space, and for all of the generous organizing that you do. Thank you, Nicolás.

About the images part os Eliza Swann’s Q&I: She Has Risen, 2017. A performance commissioned by Art in Odd Places (AiOP) and The Foundation for Contemporary Art that took place in New York City. Presented as part of AiOP: SENSE, curated by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful with Rocío Aranda Alvarado and Jodi Waynberg. She Has Risen is a public intervention on behalf of the Goddess of Love - it is a rallying cry to encourage a culture of care, nurturance, and love. Documentation by Mollie McKinley. 

To watch the video Baba Yaga, 2011, 4:14, click here.

This video splices together archival recordings of women discussing their initiations into nature-based religions with found and new footage. It takes viewers through an auditory initiation with witches who, through the use of their magic, aim to create a just and sustainable world.

Eliza Swann is an interdisciplinary artist, intuitive, writer, educator, and community organizer based in Los Angeles and New York. Eliza received a BA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA from Central St. Martins in London. She has trained in hypnotherapy at the Isis Centre in England, Vedic cosmology with Dr. Vagish Shastri, and tarot with the Builders of the Adytum. Eliza has exhibited her artwork internationally, most recently at the California Botanic Gardens (Claremont, CA), and the Women’s Center for Creative Work (Los Angeles, CA). Eliza has guest lectured at UCLA, the Hammer Museum, the San Francisco Art Institute, Central St Martins, Cal Arts, the Dia Museum, the New School and many more venues and is currently a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute. Eliza has contributed critical writing to BOMB, Arthur, Contemporary Art Review LA, and Perfect Wave Magazines. Her book The Anatomy of the Aura was released by St. Martin’s Press in April 2020.  Eliza is the founder of The Golden Dome School, a curatorial and educational platform that studies intersections of art, metaphysics and ecology.

Eliza Swann realted links: website / The Golden Dome School / Instagram